Physics from Computer Science Samson Abramsky and Bob Coecke Oxford University Computing Laboratory, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK. samson abramsky ·
[email protected] Where sciences interact. We are, respectively, a computer scientist interested in the logic and seman- tics of computation, and a physicist interested in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Currently we are pursuing what we consider to be a very fruitful collaboration as members of the same Computer Science department. How has this come about? It flows naturally from the fact that we are working in a field of computer science where physical theory starts to play a key role, that is, natural computation, with, of course, quantum computation as a special case. At this workshop there will be many advocates of this program present, and we are honoured to be part of that community. But there is more. Our joint research is both research on semantics for distributed computing with non-von Neumann architectures, and on the axiomatic foundations of physical theories. This dual character of our work comes without any compromise, and proves to be very fruitful. Computational architectures as toy models for physics. Computer science has something more to offer to the other sciences than the computer. Indeed, on the topic of mathematical and logical un- derstanding of fundamental transdisciplinary scientific concepts such as interaction, concurrency and causality, synchrony and asynchrony, compositional modelling and reasoning, open systems, qualitative versus quantitative reasoning, operational methodologies, continuous versus discrete, hybrid systems etc. computer science is far ahead of many other sciences, due to the challenges arising from the amaz- ing rapidity of the technology change and development it is constantly being confronted with.